This I Believe

“Things turn out best for those who make the best of the way things turn out,” states John Wooden. During a persons life things happen for a reason, whether they have a positive or a negative affect is up to them. People who take these incidents and use them as a learning experience will have better success in life. Those who get all upset over them are just wasting time that they could be using to improve their lives. In life things happen to hurt you, help you, confuse you, please you, ect., but from all of these incidents a person can grow.

Opportunities help build a person. In life there are opportunities for everyone, but those who work for them are the ones that achieve the most. Opportunities are something that one should take up even if unsure of the outcome, because they will help define a person. The best opportunity I’ve had so far in my life was being able to join powerlifting. This is because it was something I could never see myself doing and actually enjoying. Within life one realizes that there is more out there than that meets the eye.

Experiences shape a person for the good and the bad. Some people take experiences to heart and learn from them, while others just blow them off and keep making bad choices. Experiences are something that you should never let yourself forget, because in one way or another they help you gain knowledge. The one experience that affected me the most in my life was my parents divorce, because it’s had the longest lasting effects. During life one gains wisdom through the growing number of things that happen to them.

Relationships come and go, whether it’s due to bad experiences that occur, or to the wrong opportunities being chosen. Any type of a relationship is full of both negative and positive experiences. The good experiences are ones to remember the way they are, but the bad experiences are the ones to learn from. Opportunities are also present in all relationships; some are good while others are bad. The positive opportunities are the ones to look for in relationships where as the negative opportunities are the ones to avoid. Superior and ghastly opportunities as well as experiences arise when you’re in either a healthy or unhealthy relationship.

Both experiences and opportunities give you choices in life, which will have different outcomes depending on how you interpret them. In relationships both negative as well as positive opportunities and experiences arise to teach you some type of lesson. Both the opportunities in lifting and the experiences with my parents divorce have helped me shape relationships of all kinds. Life is full of random happenings, so just think over what happened and make the best of it. Cicero stated, “The life given to us by nature is short, but the memory of life well spent is eternal.”

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This week’s essay

Growing up in the former Yugoslavia, lawyer Djenita Pasic enjoyed the peace of her religiously diverse country. But after the fall of communism and the outbreak of the Bosnian War, Pasic was forced to reevaluate her ideas about religion and tolerance. Click here to read her essay.